Tyranny of the Majority

There’ll be more to come about a pretty historical election (mostly in all the worst ways), but it’s worth getting it out there right now: do not doubt for a moment that this was just the result that not only the print media wanted, but the result that the money men wanted, too. With the vote subsidy the very first thing on the chopping block for Harper’s new regime, large-scale corporate campaign funding will be the way of the future in this country, and the capitalists have given themselves over to the Harperites’ war on the middle class and indifference to the poor. Mildly innured from the American-style downsides of drastic income inequality by our robust social welfare state for so long, Canadians had better get used to the growing gap between wealthy and considerably-less-wealthy widening ever more with each passing year.

More specific social conservative hot-button issues are likely to be shelved to improve or at least preserve tenuous Conservative electability in the key swing ridings of Ontario (this one is on you, Golden Horseshoe, although it always is), but the more general trickle-down economic model will see few challenges over the next half-decade, even from the emboldened anti-corporate NDP (the Official Opposition; pure insanity). Harper’s Conservatives are already incrementally changing what it means to be Canadian in the public sphere. The coming term will tell us how many of the smaller social details they can alter. It’s easy to be cynical and probably easier to be blind to consequence, but I for one am not much looking forward to this.